Cherry Avenue SE: Golden age of black business in Canton

Charita Goshay

Sunday

Feb 26, 2012 at 12:01 AMFeb 26, 2012 at 4:39 PM

For decades, the 13 blocks that comprised Cherry Avenue SE were the hub of the city’s black-owned businesses. Today, virtually nothing remains of the neighborhood, which was demolished to make way for an overpass in the 1970s.

Just hearing the phrase “Cherry Street” can put a smile on the faces of the people in whose memories its Golden Age still lives.

For decades, the 13 blocks that comprised Cherry Avenue SE were the hub of the city’s black-owned businesses.

Cherry, say those who remember it, had everything. You could get your hair pressed, your clothes cleaned and your soul saved.

In the days before integration, Cherry was an oasis. Blacks could hail a cab, have lunch at the Tennessee or rent a room at the Hotel Milner with no hassle.

Anyone could get groceries on a tab, find the latest hits at the Record Rack and enjoy a milkshake at Cosey Drugs. You could lay a bet at Beanie’s or order a “pony” (pint) of beer from one of the clubs. You could grab a soda at Cox’s Corner and head out to the baseball game at Jackson Park.

You could practically live out your whole life without leaving the neighborhood.

It was Canton’s unofficial-but-understood discrimination practices that precipitated a flourish of black-owned businesses on Cherry. Today, virtually nothing remains of the neighborhood, which was demolished to make way for an overpass in the 1970s.

Cherry was a neighborhood in which rogues and role models co-existed. Some establishments were mere fronts for such illegalities as the numbers racket, poker and after-hours liquor, said Jasper Harris, whose parents, Odie and Lillian, opened an ice cream shop at 504 Cherry Ave. SE in 1938.

“Everything was wide open,” he said. “It was a busy little street.”

Click here to see an interactive map with photos.

Cherry ran parallel with Rex Avenue, then the city’s red-light district. “We’d make milkshakes and my brother Tom and I would deliver them to the ladies on Rex,” Harris recalled with a laugh. “We weren’t allowed to go into the houses. We were too young.”

His deeply religious mother eventually insisted that his father close the business. (He later opened a garage.) “She’d say, ‘Odie Harris, these boys aren’t gonna be worth a nickel!’ ” their son said. “When my mother walked down Cherry Street on her way home, guys fighting on the sidewalk or doing whatever would stop, step off and let her pass. They could tell a lady was coming.”

‘MASON-DIXON LINE’

“I can picture it like it was yesterday,” Mary Parker says. “Many, many vivid memories of Cherry Avenue SE from East (Tuscarawas) and Cherry, which was called the ‘Mason-Dixie Line,’ to what was, back in the day, known as Cherry extension or ‘Up On the Hill,’ as it was lovingly called.

“I was born and raised on Fifth and Cherry SE, right dab in the middle of all the legal and illegal businesses. Cherry Avenue SE was a hub of businesses owned by a lot of different nationalities, not just blacks.”

“I remember going to Maggiorie’s, where everybody had a tab,” said Carolyn Sims, whose father, George Clark, owned several businesses on Cherry Avenue in the 1950s. Clark used a G.I. loan to buy a building at 1021 Cherry Ave. SE that featured a storefront and apartments. He also operated a rotisserie restaurant and later Clark’s Record Shop, where he designed listening stations with headphones.

Clark also parlayed technical skills he had acquired in the Navy as one of its first black navigators into operating his own TV and radio repair shop.

‘DEFINITELY A PIONEER’

Clark’s business was a stone’s throw from Freeman Wright’s Barber Shop at 1011 Cherry Ave. SE.

“My dad was one of the first black barbers in Canton,” said Carol Wright-Harris. “He was on Cherry for 40 years. He was definitely a pioneer.”

For a time, the enterprising Wright and his wife, Sadie, the parents of 11, also operated a dry cleaning store and a restaurant. Wright also ran a shoe shine and hat stand at 723 Cherry Ave. SE and hunted raccoons, which his wife cooked and sold along with pies and cakes.

“They taught us to not give up, to use perseverance, that you can do anything you want to do,” Wright-Harris said.

Deeply religious members of People’s Baptist Church, the Wrights counted William Powell, founder of Clearview Golf Club, and Dr. J.B. Walker, the city’s first black physician, among their friends. “They were hard workers, and they taught us to love the Lord,” their daughter said.

The Wrights lived on 14th Street SE across from the former Lathrop School. Wright-Harris said the youngest children visited the restaurant daily until her 6-year-old sister died as a result of a fire at their home. “My dad closed the restaurant,” she said. “They were totally distraught.”

Brewer owned and operated Southside Pharmacy for 41 years. He had arrived in Canton following his graduation from the University of Toledo in 1931. The sisters worked at the pharmacy, and their mother, Florence, relieved her husband for dinner.

“He taught us how to deal with people, how to accept people the way they were,” Annette Brewer said.

“His work ethic was what I learned,” her sister added. “He was at that pharmacy 24/7.”

They said their father was inspired by Horatio Alger. “He really believed he could do anything,” Annette Brewer said. “At 13, he wanted to be a pharmacist, even though they tried to dissuade him in high school. They told him he would never be able to learn Latin. My father knew Latin until the day he died.”

Brewer’s industry paid off. He purchased a home in Perry Township’s Parknoll allotment, once an enclave of black professionals. He also served as Stark’s first black foreman of a grand jury.

“He was a good provider,” Wright-Harris said. “He tried to give us every opportunity he could.”

“He was on his feet 12 to 14 hours a day,” Annette Brewer said. The pharmacy was “a state-of-the art place. People used to congregate there. He made his own medicines, you know, with the pestle and mortar. I just thought that was the coolest thing, and he did it with no computers.”

FORBIDDEN ZONES

Parker recalled the poultry markets where customers picked out live chickens that were then processed and wrapped in paper. “A door or two down was Marsino’s, filled with candy and costumes. A few more steps and there was a store front — gypsy fortune tellers, complete with the (crystal) ball.

“A little further down the street (at 324 Cherry SE) was the infamous Mabel’s Chicken Shack. White people from all over Canton and Stark Country came there especially on weekends, all hours of the night until daylight, to drink, gamble, eat and just have a good time with their friends. ... Everyone felt safe, and they were. No one got robbed or mugged or killed. When you came to Mabel’s, you were family, you were safe. Same with Beanie’s, another illegal after-hours speakeasy.”

The Clarks lived near the decidedly more sedate Matthews Funeral Home. “Whenever they’d have a body, they’d turn on these globes outside,” Sims recalled. “The neighborhood kids would go inside and look at the bodies.”

Funeral director Gladys Matthews was a role model for young Kay Averette, a retired librarian who lives in Osnaburg Township but grew up on Lippert Road NE.

“I remember visiting Gladys Matthews,” she said. “We would sit and talk for hours. I couldn’t believe an adult would spend time like that with me. She was always uplifting, a beautiful woman. She ran the business on her own. She was just an amazing woman to me.”

That many parents forbade their children from venturing into certain businesses made them all the more enticing. Sims recalled Nick Butler’s bar: “When we’d pass by, we’d always look in.

“We were not allowed on 10th Street, and I never knew why. We weren’t allowed on Rex Avenue, and Daddy said he’d better not find out we were down at Beanie’s.”

Because the Baby Grand nightclub advertised upcoming shows, some of them risqué, on its marquee, “We wouldn’t be allowed to walk on that side of the street,” Sims recalled, laughing.

“There was a big truck-transfer station right across from Mabel’s Chicken Shack,” Averette recalled. “That’s where we learned what adults (were doing). My father was an associate pastor at Mount Calvary Baptist Church, so you know we couldn’t get caught. After choir rehearsal, some of the members would go in Mabel’s, but they’re weren’t like some of the dastardly regular visitors.”

“I remember walking up Cherry,” Donna Brewer-Harris said. “The pharmacy was some distance from ‘the happenings,’ but people were very protective of us.”

Jeff Sklar, too, has fond memories of Cherry, where his father, Ben, operated a confectionery during the 1950s, offering everything from patent medicine to ice cream and magazines. “It was a community, there,” he said. “We were one of the few white families in the neighborhood. People treated us so nice.”

In 1955, Ben Sklar received a plaque honoring him as the community’s “man of the year.”

“It was a real experience for me because I got to know people in the African-American community,” Jeff Sklar said. “To this day, there are older people who remember my dad’s store.”

MEMORIES IN PRINT

Melvin “Frog” Howell, who died in 2011, was so enamored with Cherry Avenue that he self-published a book, “Memories of Cherry Street,” in 2002. With help from his girlfriend, Jeanetta Roby, Howell amassed dozens of old photographs from people who lived and worked in the neighborhood.

“There was a cab company called Southside Cab, but they had so many accidents, we kids used to call it Suicide Cab,” Howell said, laughing.

“Cherry was booming when I came up in 1960” from South Carolina, said his wife, Lucille. “Most of the (black) churches were there. It looked like New York City.”

John Lucas grew up within walking distance of Cherry and frequented the same places as the Howells. “We all looked out for each other,” he said “People had a hand in helping out with kids, anything you needed to be done. I remember that Mildred Clark was one of the first black employees to work in a grocery store — Charlie Strasser’s. It was big deal back then.”

Lucas and his friends watched the Saturday Night Fights on a TV in the back of the Baby Grand night club — but there was a problem: “Eddie Levert, Walt Williams and Billy Powell (the O’Jays) would be practicing singing in the back. We’d put them out and tell them, ‘You guys are making too much noise.’ ”

‘BAD, BAD BOYS’

George Musica’s fondest recollections center on ice cream. The family lived at 1218 Cherry Ave. SE across from Cox’s Corner until about 1960. Canton’s southeast quadrant was home to many Italian and Greek immigrants, and blacks who came north during the Great Migration.

“When the ice cream man would come, Mr. Cox would let us have the empty drum and let us eat the ice cream left in it,” he said.

He and his six siblings also patronized Page’s Confectionery at 1016 Cherry Ave., owned by the family of Alan Page, the Pro Football Hall of Fame enshrinee and Minnesota Supreme Court justice. “They used to make their own ice cream bars. They were huge and only a nickel then,” Musica said.

Musica, the son of Italian immigrants, said the neighborhood was well-integrated and everyone got along. “I remember two black patrolmen, Tut Allen and (James) Calhoun. They would walk by, look at me and my brothers and say, ‘Bad, bad boys,’ ” he said, laughing.

G.P. Sams says it’s the music of Cherry that echoes. A retired school principal, Sams is host of “Ricco’s Oldies Show” on WDPN 1310 AM radio.

“I remember Southside Cabs, American Poultry and the Milner Hotel, which burned down to the ground in late 1950s; my uncle lived there,” he said. “My uncle Sam Spanoles, who was a Greek immigrant, owned ... the Grand View Grill (301 Cherry). He was very good to the community. He let people run a bar tab.”

Sams said one of his favorite spots was the Pathfinder Skating Rink, a live-music venue. “The place was huge,” he said. “I saw the original Drifters there, with Ben E. King. I saw the Parakeets; the O’Jays went through many times. Count Head was a great, great local jazz group. That place was packed. Most of them were African-American youngsters, but I spent many, many hours there.”

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